Ryuji didn’t move for a moment, his body going stiff in my arms. I wanted desperately to pull away, but for now he was standing still. Maybe if I never moved from this spot for the rest of my life, he would be permanently frozen too.

When I felt him shift under my arms, I winced and closed my eyes, turning away from him. Whatever horrible things he was going to do to me, I didn’t want to watch. I only prayed that my death would be quick.

Nothing happened.

“Um, L-Lena,” Ryuji said. I couldn’t tell if he was stuttering out of rage, but for some reason, his voice sounded a bit timid to me. Perhaps it was an auditory hallucination. Maybe I was already dead.

“I,” he paused, taking a deep breath. “I can feel them,” he said. “On my back.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but he sounded nervous for some reason. I opened my eyes, daring to peek up at my death.

I was shocked to see Ryuji staring down at me, a heavy blush on his face, so red that it looked like… No wait. Was that actual blood?

“You’re bleeding?” I said, the comment coming out as a question. I knew Otherworlders were technically mortal, but I’d never heard of an Otherworlder that was so fragile that he’d start to bleed randomly. Did he have some magic that was related to blood? There were supposedly some Vampiric Demons that could manipulate blood in place of mana. Maybe it was similar to that, and he was just extracting some of his blood to use as a weapon against me?

It didn’t seem likely. Ryuji seemed as confused as I was.

“I am?” he asked. He seemed to think for a moment, but reached up, easily breaking my hold on him to touch his face.

As his finger wiped the blood from underneath his nose, his eyes widened and his mouth fell agape.

“Status,” he said. “Current status effects.”

As Ryuji swept his finger randomly in thin air, I noticed Bran slowly creeping away from the scene, walking backwards step by step. I had no idea how he had the fortitude to keep his knees from going weak, but I was damn jealous.

“Help me,” I mouthed silently to him, not trusting my own legs enough to sneak away fast enough.

Bran nodded slightly at me, but continued to walk away, doing nothing to help me do the same. Apparently lipreading wasn’t a skill of his.

“Oh, are you fucking kidding me?!” Ryuji suddenly shouted. “I know I got isekaied and all, but you’re telling me I have anime character constitution? Am I going to keep getting nosebleeds every time this happens?!”

I heard a pattering of footsteps and looked around to see that Bran had used the outburst as a momentary distraction to run away. Bastard. I was so holding this over his head for the rest of his life if we got out of this alive.

Ryuji seemed to be finished with yelling up into the sky, and turned around at me, mumbling something about shitty tropes, whatever that was. He still had a thick bloodsmear on his lips, but I wasn’t about to point it out to him.

“Sorry about that,” he said.

“Are you okay?” I asked, hoping the answer would be, ‘No, I have a terminal illness called Anime Character Constitution, a non-contagious disease native to my world. I will die soon, and no longer be a danger to you.’

“Yeah,” he said instead, crushing my dreams. “Hey, where did that bastard go?”

“Oh Bran?” I asked, internally agreeing with the bastard sentiment. “He just left. But he won’t be bothering us anymore, thanks to you.”

“Oh,” Ryuji said, blushing and turning to the side. “You’re welcome.”

Not what I meant, but the good old routine of smile and ignore came to me easily.

“So,” I said, changing subjects away from Bran with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. “I suppose I should show you around the town, huh?”

“Show me around town?” Ryuji repeated, blushing again for some reason. “You mean like a…”

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He trailed off, and I had no idea why.

“Like a what?” I asked.

“Nevermind,” he said.

I liked to think that by now, I’d gotten used to the awkward silences to the point where I no longer even bothered to acknowledge them.

“I’ll take you to the mayor.” I waited for a response, but continued when I didn’t get one immediately. “Anybody visiting our village has to report to him or the Sheriff, just so they know that you’re not a sketchy person or anything.” Though not many people bothered to actually make those reports, since it was usually only family members of villagers who ever came to visit Plainswood, it was still technically the truth.

I paused for a long while. I’d hoped that Ryuji would comment on it or ask any sort of follow-up questions, but when he stayed silent, I started to feel more and more uncomfortable. I guess I hadn’t gotten used to the awkward silences like I’d hoped. It was especially bad since I kept walking in front of Ryuiji. While it helped ease my worries, knowing that I wouldn’t have to constantly keep my expression friendly, it was hard not being able to see Ryuji’s face and getting a gauge for how he was feeling at any given moment.

Looking around me, I saw my fellow villagers either smiling woodenly at Ryuji or quickly picking up their children and scurrying away as fast as they could without looking like they were running. To his credit, Bran really knew how to get people to listen to him. I knew him and his family were popular in the village, but it took a real charisma to get these people to not run away screaming.

Unfortunately, even if Bran had done his job perfectly, it didn’t seem like any of my fellow villagers were born actors, with most of them being much worse than how I imagined myself. I could even see some of them crying through their smiles.

“So!” I said, drawing Ryuji’s attention to me as his eyes wandered to the people edging away from him. “Anime! What’s that?”

I wondered if it would be dangerous to poke the Otherworlder for knowledge that was clearly unique to his world, especially if it was somehow related to a syndrome that could cause him to bleed spontaneously. As soon as the question came out of my mouth, I worried that it would seem like I was trying to pry into his weaknesses, but it was hard to think of another topic.

“Huh?” he said, clearly confused. “You’ve heard of anime?! You guys have anime in this world?” he asked, clearly excited.

“N-no,” I stuttered, a little scared to disappoint him. “But you said something like anime a few seconds ago. I’ve never heard that word before and I was just wondering what that was.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly disappointed, but much less than I feared. “Well, it might be a bit difficult to explain.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “It’s a bit of a walk to the Mayor’s house.” And I needed something to distract him on the way there.

Ryuji looked surprised for a second, then his eyebrows scrunched together in concentration. “Well,” he said. “It might be difficult to explain it without a frame of reference. Do you guys have stuff like moving pictures in this world? I mean, country.”

I ignored the slip-up and the poor attempt to cover it. “Moving pictures?” I asked. “Like when a painting gets possessed by a Poltergeist Demon?”

I swore I heard him hungrily whisper the word, ‘demon,’ but I wasn’t sure. “No,” he said. “Not anything like that. It’s more like something for entertainment, when you have a bunch of pictures moving really fast.”

“Like a flipbook?”

“Yeah!” he said. “Kind of. It’s like a flipbook except it’s usually twenty-three minutes long and instead of a big book, it’s shown on a… a big box of light and it tells a story, and it has voice actors and everything.”

My eyes widened at the mention of the big box of light. It was said that while the Otherworlders came from a place that didn’t possess any magic, their levels of technology were so much more advanced than ours that we might consider it magic if we ever saw it. While I had no real interest in this fake magic, the Crown had an ongoing bounty for any information on how to replicate these technologies. I knew I would already be getting a bounty payout if I managed to get Ryuji to name me as his first contact to a Crown official, but if I managed to get some information about this ‘magic’ light box from his world…

“Oh wow! That’s so interesting!” I said. “Could you tell me a little more about that?”

“Really?!” Ryuji asked, sounding genuinely surprised for some reason. “Not many girls want to hear about it.”

I simply smiled at him, wondering why he specifically pointed out my gender but not asking why.

“Well,” he said. “If you’re sure…”

By the time I regained consciousness, I realized we were standing outside the door to the Mayor’s house. My hand was raised, like I was prepared to knock, but I had no idea what had happened in the past twenty minutes or so it would’ve taken us to walk here.

“But when Hirito gets to the hospital, he’s ambushed by the bad guy, but this time he has a knife and he’s prepared to kill him and Nasuna in the real world, since you know, he failed to do it in the virtual world. But since Hirito’s been fighting in the real world, all that fighting data is ingrained in his instinct and he’s able to beat the bad guy up, even without his game stats. Man. That scene was so cool.”

Oh yeah. That.

Unfortunately for me, instead of talking about the magic light box like I wanted, Ryuji started to talk about something completely different, introducing new concepts and ideas that I found impossible to follow. I ended up just zoning out, nodding my head, and agreeing to whatever he said, whenever prompted.

“I hate to interrupt you, Ryuji,” I said, interrupting him eagerly. “But we’re here.”

“Oh,” he says. “Okay. I guess talking to the mayor is more important for now. Maybe I can tell you more later?”

Oh Gods, please no.

“Sure!” I hoped my laugh didn’t sound too manic. “Later. But let's not keep the Mayor waiting, shall we?”

I knocked on the door, possibly a bit louder than was normal.

“You may enter!” came a response, much louder and higher pitch than was normal from the Mayor. It seemed like Bran had managed to warn him.

I opened the door, eager to deposit the problem into the lap of a responsible adult.